Mama to two little boys, Lilo (3 and a half years) and Ju (5 years), I blog about our crafting, baking and general activities.

Thursday, 3 January 2013

New Year Calendar

Happy New Year everybody! New Year sometimes involves serious changes, like new resolutions or perhaps a new way of life, but firstly and most practically, it means you need a new calendar (unless you're working with an academic one or have gone fully digital). Ju has been very disappointed that there are no more advent calendar windows to be opened. With the new year just starting , I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to make him a felt calendar. We have already ordered our photo calendars for all the grandparents, which feature both boys (and us parents occasionally) through the seasons. And we received a home made calendar from Oma (my mother) just last week. Calendars ARE on our mind.

Ju knows about seasons, the days of the week and counts up to twenty (after 20, he counts: "a lot"). Building on this, the calendar will gradually introduce additional numbers up to 31, as well as months and dates, to help him understand how the year is divided up into months, weeks and days. He is often interested in describing the weather and understands that sunny doesn't necessarily mean warm.

I cut out rectangles of different colours for the months and blanket-stitched the edges using a sewing machine. I then painted some of the months' names with glittery white fabric paint and wrote down others with a Sharpie marker (this wasn't as easy as I thought it would be). I wrote the days of the week on rectangles of felt (one colour for each day) with a black Sharpie marker.

I cut out numbers in black felt which I hot glued onto the squares. Ju helped me organise the numbers in order.

I made felt shapes of a cloud, a sun, an umbrella and a snowflake, and machine stitched detail onto them.

I made the actual calendar using a large felt square sightly bigger than a piece of strong card recycled from some packaging. I machine stitched a rectangle of grey felt into the middle and machine stitched some separators to make a table.

I cut out some felt letters to write DAY, DATE and MONTH and hot glued these on in the first column. I then hot glued the whole thing onto the cardboard, tucking the edges around the back.

We have now hung the calendar in the kitchen and the first thing Ju does when he comes in the morning is to put the right date and weather on the calendar.